Guggenheim

Heartbeat Island: French artist, Christian Boltankski, has recorded the heartbeats of over 35,000 people and stored them on a tiny Japanese island for his project, “Les Archives du Coeur.” His touring booth is slated to come through Finland in 2012, so you romantic types should probably start booking tickets for Valentine’s Day…

I eat an apple every single day. I order them from Fresh Direct, and unless I click the ‘organic’ option I get four Granny Smith apples delivered right to my door “fresh” from Chile. Like most people, I rationalize this somehow. “My farmers market is only once a week,” I reassure myself, “and I need apples more than just once and besides, they don’t even have the tart and crisp Granny Smiths that I need and love.” As environmentally aware and responsible as I like to think I am, it didn’t even cross my mind that if a farmer in New York isn’t growing Granny Smith apples, maybe I just don’t get to eat them.

photo by Jason Schmidt
When conceptual artist Hans Peter Feldmann revealed what he would do with the $100,000 award money that accompanies the annual Hugo Boss Prize, critics were split between those who thought it seemed like an obvious, even hammy approach and those who “wished it could be on permanent display.” Recipients of the prize are expected to use at least part of the hundred-grand towards a new work, but so far no one has dedicated each and every dollar of it in the way Feldmann has – using it to line the walls of the Guggenheim. And while he could have easily obtained $100,000-worth of brand new bills (much more easily, in fact), Feldmann’s $100,000 wallpaper is made up of only used bills. It’s not enough to line the entire rotunda, it’s more than enough for the second-floor gallery, where it will be on display until November 2, 2011.

Before musician Andrew Bird stepped onto the small stage at the bottom of the Guggenheim rotunda for the second installation of their Dark Sounds summer concert series, the packed crowd had a chance to peruse a field of Victrola-style speakers arranged into groupings of 3-foot tall ‘hornlings’ and a few impressive 8-footers, playing the sounds of crickets. The brightly-colored mouths of the speakers – red, orange, gold – took on the feel of a garden at sunset and transformed what was essentially a bunch of amplifiers into an audiovisual landscape of organic forms.

You probably never thought you’d live to see the day when those little white museum placards would list YouTube as a material. That day has finally arrived and it might not be such a bad thing. The Guggenheim recently announced a partnership with YouTube for their first Biennial of Creative Video, a collaboration that embraces…

Einstein had the math that explained the movement of black holes, but even the inimitable physicist couldn’t tell you what it all meant or answer questions like how black holes are so powerful they even pull in light. So what is a black hole, and what’s on the other side of it? That’s the subject of the new play, “Icarus on the Edge of Time” opening at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on June 2nd to mark the opening of the third annual World Science Festival.

Upon entering the psychedelic bat cave that was Traverse Temporal Gyrus (the latest installation at The Guggenheim from Animal Collective and film artist Danny Perez), you were immediately bathed in a surreal environment of swirling sound and floating images. The museum was abuzz last night as fans crowded in for this special one-day collaborative exhibit. Selling out almost instantly, The Guggenheim had to add an earlier show to accommodate the spiked interest.

Walk into the Guggenheim on January 29th and you will not see a single piece of art. In fact, it was difficult to find an image to use for this post because, for the very first time in its 50 year history, the Guggenheim is taking all the art off the walls of the rotunda to prepare for the coming of Tino Sehgal. Sehgal’s work is some of the most clever use of what we might call formal art space, meaning galleries, private collections and museums. Some of his previous exhibitions have taken place at the Tate, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Before Frederic Franklin worked with Josephine Baker at the Casino de Paris, and later with some of the best ballerinas of the 20th century, before his work earned him the Laurence Olivier Award for dance, he started out with just a few steps. Before Philip Glass composed a single song, he began with just a few notes. And before theoretical physicist Lisa Randall delved into the extra dimensions of space, she started out just looking up at the sky. But how did they make the initial connections that led to such rewarding careers?

On October 29, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum inaugurates its first ever Annual Art Awards, which will be presented by artist Rob Pruitt. The Art Awards celebrates select individuals, exhibitions, and projects that have made a significant impact on the field of contemporary art during the past year. Pruitt, whose conceptual practice is rooted in…

To celebrate its fifty anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum organized an exhibition paying tribute to its designer with “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward” which will run through August 23, 2009. This exhibition “brings together sixty-four projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures.”